China entered the year 2000 encumbered with a 19th-century ideology and a mid-20th-century industrial plant but was nevertheless determined to become one of the world’s leading powers in the 21st century. There was good reason to suppose that such an ambitious goal lay within reach. During the course of the year, however, the Chinese government found itself struggling with a number of long-standing problems. Among them were managing the increasingly complex economy, curbing corruption, maintaining domestic order, keeping pressure on Taiwan, and preventing further deterioration in relations with the U.S. Even as Pres. Jiang Zemin focused on establishing his historical legacy, the celebratory mood of 1999—when the Communist Party of China (CPC) marked its 50th year in power—gave way to more sober, though still mostly optimistic, assessments of the future.

Politics and the Economy

Since Deng Xiaoping’s break with the Maoist command economy in the 1980s, pervasive corruption had been the handmaiden of economic reform in China. Rejecting the approach afforded by an open press and a competitive political system, the government and the CPC renewed their joint assault on corruption through a series of high-profile trials that targeted officials just below the top echelons of power. In September, Cheng Kejie, former Guangxi provincial governor and vice-chairman of the Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress, was executed after being convicted of having accepted nearly $5 million in bribes and having illegally sold state land. His mistress, Li Ping, received a life sentence for her role in the scandal. The official People’s Daily newspaper thundered, “There is no place for corrupt elements to hide in the party,” and “all citizens are equal before the law.” Each of these propositions had yet to be consistently demonstrated.

An even more massive corruption scandal involving billions of dollars and some 200 officials wound its way through the courts of coastal Fujian province. The former vice-minister of public security, Li Jizhou, and the former police chief, vice-mayor, and head of the customs service in Xiamen city were among the accused. Earlier, the former vice-governors of Jiangxi and Guangxi provinces were executed for corruption. In May, Mou Qizhong, once publicly lauded as a leading Chinese entrepreneur, was sentenced to life imprisonment for financial fraud. The National Audit Office instituted a new policy of routinely inspecting the accounts of all retiring high-ranking officials for evidence of financial improprieties. At the popular level, an exhibition showcasing successful government efforts to combat corruption drew large crowds in Beijing. These campaigns signified renewed strength within the CPC of old- and new-guard leftists who viewed corruption as an inevitable consequence of Deng-era capitalist reforms, of which they disapproved.

Two years before his scheduled retirement from the state presidency in 2003, Jiang Zemin, who also doubled as CPC general secretary and chair of the party’s Central Military Commission, attempted to burnish his reputation as a party theorist by enunciating the so-called Three Represents. Jiang asserted that the CPC had always represented three essential concerns: China’s development needs, the country’s advanced culture, and the fundamental interests of the vast majority of the Chinese people. This was an unsubtle expression of Jiang’s determination to justify the party’s exclusive hold on power in a society that in so many ways had already outgrown the restrictive framework of party rule. While further promoting Hu Jintao as his designated successor, Jiang also favoured CPC Organization Department chief Zeng Qinghong, who was expected to become a member of the inner Political Bureau Standing Committee in 2002. Meanwhile, Jiang appointed three younger generals, Cao Gangchuan, Guo Boxiong, and Xu Caihou, to take over day-to-day management of the armed forces from the elderly Zhang Wannian and Chi Haotian.

Political and religious repression continued to be a hallmark of Jiang’s administration. Beneath their facade of self-assurance, government officials were anxious about social stability. For years one locus of unrest had been Xinjiang province, where a militant minority among the nine million Uygurs, a Turkic-speaking Muslim people, had resorted to force in their campaign to overturn Chinese rule. With sporadic violence continuing in Xinjiang, Beijing initiated a massive effort in March to accelerate the economic development of China’s vast western region, including not only Xinjiang but also Tibet, Sichuan province, and several other economically depressed provinces. The western development project shifted state investment priorities away from the prosperous coastal provinces to the lagging interior, where poverty remained a major problem. Even if these long-term efforts succeeded, they would not necessarily undercut separatist appeals, which fed on religious and cultural grievances no less than on economic ones. Meanwhile, Tibet continued to bear the brunt of heavy-handed Chinese rule as restrictions on Tibetan Buddhism and Tibetan culture were tightened. The Dalai Lama charged that Beijing was pursuing a policy of cultural genocide. In January Beijing suffered a major humiliation with the spectacular flight to India of the young Karmapa Lama, who was received by the Dalai Lama and allowed to remain in India despite Chinese protests. Beijing had counted on the previously docile Karmapa Lama to help it implement its Tibetan policy.

Beijing’s crackdown on Falun Gong, a spiritual movement that blended elements of Buddhism and Taoism with meditation and exercise, continued into its second year. Braving certain arrest, groups of Falun Gong followers periodically practiced their faith in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square and were quickly taken into custody. Human rights groups estimated that at least 57 Falun Gong members had died in prison. The government also proscribed the activities of similar groups, including Zhong Gong, whose charismatic leader, Zhang Hongbao, sought political asylum in the American territory of Guam, from which Beijing sought unsuccessfully to extradite him on criminal charges. Evangelical Christians and Roman Catholics loyal to the Vatican were other targets of repression. Eighty-one-year-old Bishop Zeng Jingmu, released in 1998 after 30 years in prison, was rearrested in September for his continued refusal to recognize the authority of the state-controlled Roman Catholic Church. Beijing, reacting sourly to the Vatican’s intention to canonize 130 Chinese Catholics martyred between 1648 and 1930, charged that most of them had been imperialist agents and deserved to die. In sum, a rising tide of religious faith lapped at the porous foundations of communist rule as a significant portion of the population looked to a variety of homegrown and domesticated foreign religions for spiritual fulfillment. The arrest, in separate incidents, of two visiting U.S.-based Chinese intellectuals—Song Yongyi, a research librarian, and Bei Ling, a well-known poet and editor—provoked twin storms of international criticism. Both were released and allowed to return to the U.S.

Chinese authorities wrestled too with the question of how to control traffic on the information highway as the number of Internet users in China, doubling every six months, rose to 15 million by midyear. In addition to blocking the World Wide Web sites of overseas human rights organizations and selected foreign newspapers, the Ministry of State Security shut down the New Culture Forum, a dissident Web site. The ministry also arrested Huang Qi, founder of China’s first human rights Web site, and Jiang Shihua, operator of an Internet cafe in Sichuan, for having posted articles critical of the CPC.

As China’s population—growing by 10 million annually—approached the 1.3 billion mark, authorities reaffirmed the one-child policy, which, they claimed, had prevented at least 250 million births over the past 20 years. Widespread evasion of this policy persisted in rural areas, although not in the cities. The difficulty of policing the vast rural reaches of China was underscored by a campaign to stop the selling of rural women and girls into prostitution. Tens of thousands of such unfortunates were kidnapped annually or hoodwinked with false promises of urban factory employment. Thousands of boys were likewise kidnapped and coerced into becoming pickpockets under the harsh control of professional criminals. According to its own experts, China had been slow to address the growing problem of AIDS and sexually transmitted diseases, which had been increasing at an annual rate of 30% for a few years. Sex education was still very limited, and few resources had been invested in promoting safe sexual practices. Lax procedures for collecting and processing blood donations had contributed to the spread of AIDS, as had widespread addiction to opiates and needle-sharing among drug addicts.

Both an immediate and a long-term threat to China’s prosperity was the country’s growing water crisis. China was endowed with only one-quarter of the world’s per capita average of water resources, and the demands that agriculture, industry, and a growing urban population put on water supplies had already led to severe depletion of groundwater levels, conflicts between upstream and downstream consumers, and theft of water by desperate farmers. Perhaps a fifth or more of the country’s water supply was wasted through inefficient irrigation systems, antiquated delivery systems, and the lack of realistic pricing systems for water resources.

Spurred once again by large-scale state investment in infrastructure development and robust export performance, the economy did better than expected, growing at around 8.1% through the first half of the year. This was one percentage point higher than the growth of 1999. In March Beijing announced its renewed intention to run a large deficit in order to stimulate the economy. The proceeds from a $12.5 billion bond issue were to be allocated to infrastructural development, 70% of which would go to the underdeveloped west; expenditures on social welfare would double.

Slack consumer demand persisted as the reduction or termination of government housing, medical, and education subsidies to urban dwellers caused people to focus on long-term security rather than on current spending. Nevertheless, the two-year-plus deflationary period came to an end, and the consumer price index showed a modest 0.1% rise by midyear. In Shanghai, Beijing, and other major cities, the more affluent urbanites invested in privately owned apartments, co-ops, and consumer durables. Foreign currency reserves increased to $158.4 billion at midyear from $150.6 billion a year earlier. Significant growth occurred in e-commerce as young Chinese entrepreneurs, handsomely bankrolled by foreign investors, explored the possibilities of the new economic frontier.

The strains of transition away from an economy dominated by state-owned enterprises to a competitive market economy were manifested in numerous, sometimes violent, protests by workers who had gone unpaid for months or were facing layoffs. In February 20,000 factory workers rioted in Liaoning province after a molybdenum mine was shut down, and in August irate workers briefly took six American managers hostage when their factory was threatened with closure. Similarly, thousands of farmers in Jiangxi violently protested low commodity prices and high taxes, smashing local government offices and attacking the homes of the rich. In a number of cases, troops were called out to put down protests.

Foreign Relations

China’s campaign to earn membership in the World Trade Organization (WTO) took a giant step forward in 2000. After prolonged wrangling across partisan lines, the U.S. Congress approved the granting of permanent normal trade relations (PNTR) to China. The administration of Pres. Bill Clinton and the American business community strongly supported PNTR; labour, human rights, and environmental groups opposed them. In China, as in the U.S. and elsewhere, critics of economic globalization decried the loss of national economic sovereignty and claimed that membership in the WTO—which they viewed as an instrument of foreign, particularly American, capitalism—would harm domestic interests. Nevertheless, China was expected to join the WTO in 2001.

U.S.-China relations recovered partially from the crisis occasioned by the May 1999 NATO bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade, Yugos., but mutual suspicion remained the keynote. The victory of Chen Shui-bian, a pro-independence candidate, in Taiwan’s March 2000 presidential election renewed the question of what position Washington would take in the event of a direct clash between Beijing and Taipei. China strongly warned the U.S. to keep out of its domestic affairs, including management of the Taiwan issue. Beijing refused Chen’s olive branch of unconditional discussions, insisting that he first pledge unequivocal support for Beijing’s version of the One China principle. This Chen refused to do. While issuing numerous threats, Beijing did not, however, resort to military exercises or missile tests, as it had four years earlier during Taiwan’s first direct presidential election.

Prior to the June 2000 North-South Korean summit meeting in Pyongyang, Beijing welcomed North Korean leader Kim Jong Il for three days of consultation with President Jiang, National People’s Congress Chairman Li Peng, Premier Zhu Rongji, and other top leaders. The meetings were viewed as an indication of China’s interest in a peaceful resolution to the intra-Korean conflict. Relations with Japan remained barely satisfactory as Japanese officials complained about Chinese maritime maneuvers and seabed exploration in Japanese territorial waters. In October Premier Zhu Rongji made an official six-day visit to Japan. In July Russian Pres. Vladimir Putin visited Beijing, where he and Jiang jointly condemned U.S. proposals for national and Asian theatre missile defense systems, which the Russians and Chinese perceived as violations of the 1972 antiballistic missile treaty. China threatened to significantly upgrade its own nuclear weapons program if Washington went ahead with the proposals. President Clinton opted in September to leave the matter in the hands of his successor, a decision that placated Beijing in the short run. Meanwhile, Beijing pursued an active agenda in the Middle East as well as in Asia and Europe via trade, diplomatic dialogue, and high-level visits. A narrow loser in its earlier bid to host the 2000 Summer Games, China renewed its effort to bring the Olympics to Beijing, setting its sights on 2008. Beijing made the International Olympic Committee’s five-city shortlist, and Chinese officials had high hopes for taking the prize. Authorities in Beijing undertook the “greenification” of their dusty and polluted metropolis by expanding park space, planting trees and grass, and banning the use of coal for cooking and heating. The first positive results were already in evidence by year’s end.

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